By the people, for the people

Berlin’s Reichstag was rebuilt with a glass dome, a symbol of transparency following the nightmare of two totalitarian regimes. So it was fitting that in May — as President Barack Obama travelled to Europe to sell a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) drafted in consultation with corporations and not the public — that leaked TTIP documents were projected onto the Reichstag by Greenpeace activists with the headline ‘Democracy needs transparency’.

Why is TTIP, the neoliberal free trade treaty that America is aggressively pushing in Europe, so non-transparent, and apparently undemocratic?

Read also Lori M Wallach, “25 years of Nafta’s failed promises”, Le Monde diplomatique, June 2015.
To understand this, we might look to the recent US Democratic Party nomination race, when a little-known septuagenarian senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, challenged Hillary Clinton on a platform of transparency and accountability. Calling out corporations and billionaires (many behind TTIP) that have bought undue influence in government but are not accountable to voters, Sanders has loudly proclaimed that American democracy is broken.

Indeed, the democratic socialist nearly upset the coronation of the establishment candidate by exposing the unaccountable workings of what he calls a rigged political and economic system. It’s a system that Europeans need to better understand if they are concerned about an absence of public oversight in trade deal negotiations that will allow American corporations to alter European laws and subvert consumer and environmental protections.

Bernie Sanders wasn’t the first progressive politician in America to claim that Wall Street banks, fossil fuel companies and military-industrial profiteers have attained undue influence due to an institutionalised system of political bribery that is almost impossible to hold to account. But he was perhaps the first to make it a mainstream election issue.

Paying politicians massive speaking fees is a common means of influence buying, says Sanders; but corrupted campaign financing is at the root of the oligarchy that has overrun democracy in America.

The seed of the problem is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010 that allows corporations to put unlimited money into political electioneering via super PACS. By overturning this decision, and by making campaigns publicly funded, Sanders wants to force candidates to be accountable to voters and tax payers — as opposed to corporations — that will pay their way.

Like Sanders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say they want to overturn Citizens United. But these neoliberal, corporatist Democrats have each benefitted greatly from super PAC money. They also take a lot of money from corporate lobbyists. It’s the way the game works. It’s supposedly the only way to stay competitive with the Republicans.

But Sanders changed all that. He had no super PAC and took no corporate lobbyist money on principle. Incredibly, his campaign was almost wholly financed through small individual donations; and he miraculously out-funded Clinton at times — although her campaign also bypassed funding caps by ‘laundering’ corporate donations through state Democratic parties.

By legitimising millions of dollars worth of spending on political advertising by special interests, Citizens United has been a boon for news media companies now making a lot more money during election cycles. It might be assumed that this media, the so-called fourth estate of government that is another vital source of accountability in a democracy, has been less inclined to criticise policies and candidates that their biggest advertisers promote.

Read also Anne Deysine, “The price of a presidency”, Le Monde diplomatique, June 2016.
While Sanders talked a lot about the growth of too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks and increasing income disparity, he also demanded that reckless bankers be held to account — even if it meant going to jail. Of special note were the speculators who sparked the 2008 financial crisis and the loss of homes and savings for millions of people. Banks have since paid token fines, but no individual has been prosecuted.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who have each taken a lot of money from the investment banks that fomented the financial crisis — Goldman Sachs was among Obama’s biggest backers during his 2008 presidential campaign — both supported the 2008 Wall Street bailout that Sanders opposed.

Sensing the voter outrage that has been stirred up by Sanders, Clinton also promises to get tough on the bankers. But how is this possible when Wall Street pours million into her campaign? That in addition to the Clinton Foundation, a so-called nonprofit that also accepts money from foreign governments and dictatorships, noted Sanders in June. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs famously paid the former secretary of state close to $700,000 for three speeches in 2014. Despite endless requests by Sanders and others, she refuses to release the transcripts to those speeches. She promises that the money does not influence her.

The issue of Clinton’s paid Wall Street speeches was consistently used by Sanders as positive proof of the need to prioritise the fight for transparency and accountability. Clinton is deeply unpopular according to opinion polls, and part of the problem is the perception that she is bought. This might be why the New York Times, which endorsed her in January, suggested in February that she disclose the transcripts.

‘Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public — not the candidate — who decides how much disclosure is enough,’ wrote the News Corp publication in February. ‘By stonewalling on these transcripts Mrs Clinton plays into the hands of those who say she’s not trustworthy and makes her own rules. Most important, she is damaging her credibility among Democrats who are begging her to show them that she’d run an accountable and transparent White House.’

For a news outlet that openly favours Clinton, this showed how far his message about accountability had gained traction; and perhaps a fear among the establishment that the issue could bring down the candidate that promises to maintain the status quo.

Paid speeches have increasingly become a loophole through which special interests can attempt to buy political influence in the US. Incumbent politicians cannot accept speaking fees — which might explain why Clinton hit the speech circuit in earnest between finishing up as secretary of state and running for president — but their spouses can. Corporations (including Microsoft) lobbying Hillary’s State Department paid Bill Clinton over $2.5m in speaking fees, for example. ‘Several [of these] companies received millions of dollars in State Department contracts while Hillary Clinton led the institution,’ noted the International Business Times.

Despite public concerns about money in politics, the American political establishment seem to believe that transparency is not an absolute requirement in a democracy. Some things need to remain behind closed doors. This thinking was symbolically played out in the lead-up to the New York primary in April, when it was reported that a static or white-noise noise machine was pointed outside while Hillary spoke to donors at a fundraiser in Denver — presumably to stop prying journalists from listening in. Such opacity was again evident when, as secretary of state, she used a private email server so as to apparently avoid public scrutiny (for which she barely avoided a criminal indictment).

As TTIP documents drafted by hundreds of corporate trade advisors and with zero public consultation were first leaked, Bernie Sanders had levelled with Hillary Clinton in national polls, wiping out a 50 to 60 point deficit. He was behind in the race for pledged delegates but had the support of around two-thirds of Democratic Party and independent voters under the age of 45. Sanders seemed to especially appeal to disillusioned citizens who voted for Obama on a platform of change that never really came.

President Obama said he opposed Citizens United in 2010 before starting a super PAC the following year that raised ten of millions from corporations and billionaires to fund his reelection. Though he was awash in donor money during his 2008 campaign, the president did keep a promise to ban lobbyists and political action committees from funding the Democratic Party. However, that decision was easily reversed this year when party chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz — Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign co-chair who shares strong Wall Street ties — opened the party again to lobbyists. The Washington Post reported that the move ‘could provide an advantage to Hillary Clinton’s fundraising efforts’.

Read also Bhaskar Sunkara, “Bernie Sanders, American socialist”, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2016.
Could this money be influencing, as Sanders has suggested, the endless waging of war by America, including, under Secretary Clinton’s initiative, a seven-month war in Libya on the grounds of ‘pure humanitarian intervention’? Or Obama’s decision not to pursue the kind of single-payer healthcare system that is opposed by the private health insurance industry? Or the Democratic Party’s promotion of TTIP and the companion TTP free trade agreements, opposed by many Americans who remember mass job offshoring under the Nafta free trade deal signed off by Bill Clinton?

Even if it were possible to follow the money, establishment pundits and politicians have reminded Sanders and his supporters that opposition to an oligarchic political system is unrealistic. If you don’t play this game you cannot ‘get things done’. A government that is beholden to corporate patronage, is run behind closed doors and is rarely transparent, let alone accountable, is ultimately pragmatic.

And yet, while Sanders lost the electoral race, the millions of voters who have coalesced behind his political revolution could decide November’s presidential election, if many of them fail to vote for Hillary — increasingly possible after recently leaked emails proved Democratic Party bias against Sanders. In the end, her best hope may be to deliver a transparent government that is firstly accountable to the people, not her donors.

Stuart Braun

Stuart Braun is a Berlin-based writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle.